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A dynamic oligopoly model of the cigarette industry is developed to study the responses of firms to various antismoking policies and to estimate the implications for the policy efficacy. The structural parameters are estimated using a combination of micro and macro level data and firms’ optimal price and advertising strategies are solved as a Markov Perfect Nash Equilibrium. The simulation results show that tobacco tax increase reduces both the overall smoking rate and the youth smoking rate, while advertising restrictions may increase the youth smoking rate. Firm’s responses strengthen the impact of antismoking policies in the short run.

Purpose: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young adults smoke at rates much higher than the general population. Young adults, in general, are less likely to seek medical help for smoking cessation and LGB individuals are less likely to seek health care generally. Alternative methods to encourage smoking cessation are necessary. This research seeks to establish whether LGB young adults in California would be willing to use social media for smoking cessation.

Approach: We conducted 41 qualitative interviews among LGB young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles in Fall 2014.

Findings: The results suggest that our participants were interested in a LGB-focused social media intervention, as long as the intervention was private or anonymous and moderated. Further, across topical areas our participants spoke extensively about the import of social connections. We may be able to leverage these connections to encourage cessation.

Research Limitations: This is a qualitative, non-generalizable dataset from a fairly limited geographic area.

Public Health Implications: Online smoking cessation interventions aimed at young adults would benefit from further testing with LGB young adults to ensure efficacy among this population. In addition, states and localities concerned about young adult LGB smoking might benefit from investing in an online socially mediated cessation forum. Online interventions could be scalable and might be useful for other groups who regularly face discrimination, stigma, or other stressors that make successful smoking cessation difficult.

The social inclusion of youth is addressed from the perspective of goal-directed action in order to understand and foster it effectively. Conceptualized from the perspective of contextual action theory (CAT), the specific understanding of action as levels, perspectives and systems provides the basis to unpack the complexity of human action. One pertinent action system is identified as project. It refers to a series of actions over time with the same goal. Using this understanding, the social inclusion of youth is described though the joint actions and projects between youth and non-familial adults. These joint actions and projects include advocating for youth, providing instrumental knowledge and encouraging community involvement and civil engagement. CAT is also used to conceptualize and conduct research on the social inclusion of youth. Specifically, the action project method was used to describe the joint projects of both youth with disability and immigrant youth as these projects involved the youth’s social inclusion.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

There is a conflation of Mexican origin with the category “undocumented immigrant” that targets and stigmatizes undocumented Mexicans – I call this Mexican illegality stigma. I assess whether Mexican illegality stigma negatively affects the psychological well-being of Mexican-origin individuals in the US, distinguishing between undocumented Mexicans and citizen Mexican Americans. I draw from the stress process model and 52 in-depth interviews – 30 with undocumented young adults from Mexico and 22 with US-born young adults of Mexican descent – to evaluate how undocumented Mexicans and citizen Mexican Americans experience Mexican illegality stigma and to determine whether it affects the psychological well-being of undocumented Mexicans in a distinct manner. I found that all respondents experienced social rejection and discrimination when they were assumed or perceived as undocumented Mexicans. While few of the US-born respondents were affected by these incidents, most undocumented young adults found these incidents stressful because they were humiliating, excluded them from valuable resources and opportunities, and forced them to incur financial burden (e.g., unfair fines), which disrupted their transition to adulthood processes such as parenthood and labor market advancement. This study found evidence that Mexican illegality stigma is a stressor and source of distress for undocumented young adults from Mexico. As opposition to undocumented immigration from Mexico intensifies, the hostile context may further strain the psychological well-being of undocumented Mexicans.

Criminal history has been conceptualised as a socially stigmatised identity. From this perspective, we can understand criminal history as invisible, concealable and ‘not readily apparent to others’ (Chaudoir & Fisher, 2010, p. 236). Although previous periods of incarceration cannot be detected per se, during this chapter, we present several elements, such as embodiment, appearance-based inferences (i.e. assumptions of what a criminal history looks like), and information as proxy (e.g. résumé gaps, credit history), which may contribute to individual assessments and interpretations of the appearance of a criminal history. Once perceived, these elements may contribute an array of unique career experiences as individuals with a criminal history seek to navigate their employment experience. Therefore, this chapter offers insight into how the appearance of criminal history information, particularly when presented without a thorough explanation, may be left to interpretation and bias throughout the employment experience.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.